General Election 2024

Nice - that looks like it has the exact data I wanted and it's already linked!

@Chalfie - I was just going to roughly align (i.e., ignore boundaries!). Not much more I can do without way more complex modelling which would take (me) a very long time! I just want to see some rough numbers to satisfy my own curiosity.

Luckily the above data has already done something for this.

Anyway, if anyone cares, here’s a bit of playing around. There’s likely to be errors here but I’m not too worried. warning: this is self-indulgent as fuck, and a really basic analysis done over lunch

Did labour lose most of its votes in labour seats

Labour was more likely to lose votes in seats it previously held (their strategy). In all seats they lost votes in: 143 were previously labour, 80 tory, 2 PC.

What about actual proportion of voters?

Average loss in a previously held labour seat was 11.6%, and in a tory seat it was 4.3%

So even where they lost votes in tory seats, it was less severe.

Was this a Labour win or a Tory loss?

This is the harder question.

Labour would have only won 10 tory seats if we were to compare them to them against the 2019 tories. But that's not meaningful because Labour was targetting tory voters (and potentially quite successfully based on the above). So:

What about vote split? Does the 2019 tory vote look anything like the 2024 tory+reform vote?

If all reform vote came from the tories (we know it didn't, but..) combing 2024 tory and reform vote would be roughly equal to the 2019 tory vote. It's not. In most cases the tories lost more votes than reform got (on average they lost 5% more than the combined total of the two).

The places where the combined vote went up, interestingly, were largely previous labour seats (69 lab, 16 con, 1 libdem). Again, this is possible evidence of labour strategically ignoring safe seats (but it's not a particularly nice thing to see, and probably one of the more worrying things).

Seats which previously had a tory and increased their right-wing vote were:

[1] "Ashfield" "Birmingham Northfield"
[3] "Chelsea and Fulham" "Clacton"
[5] "Darlington" "Doncaster East and the Isle of Axholme"
[7] "Harrow East" "Hyndburn"
[9] "Keighley and Ilkley" "Redcar"
[11] "Rother Valley" "Spen Valley"
[13] "Tipton and Wednesbury" "West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine"
[15] "Clwyd North" "Ynys Môn"

(This would be an easy thing to fact check if someone wants to see if I made any errors! I can’t be bothered).

What if we adjust the number of reform votes going to the Tories

This is slightly different from above as this is only looking at previously held tory seats.

If we give tories all reform vote, labour still gains 47, and tories hold 135. This would put
Tories at 256 and labour 277 (hung parliament).

If we give tories 50% of reform vote if flips. Labour gains 112 and tories keep 70, which means tories at 191 and labour 342 (a small majority)

At 1/3 it's 132 and 50. Tories 171 and labour 362.

That's only part of the story (previously held tory seats). What about previous labour seats?

Labour would have lost 9 seats to the right if combined. 0 seats if we give the tories 50% of reform vote. So if we give the tories all reform vote it’s 265 tory and 268 labour. This is the other worrying thing. A united right continues to be a strong force (not really a surprise, but again, the share of seats minimises the reality of this threat).

Overall

This super basic analysis supports claims that the labour strategy worked, but not universally. I'd say they "won" a majority of their seats from the tories, but a substantial number were “lost” by tories. I would not call it a labour strategy blowout by any means, but I also wouldn't say there’s evidence labour would have done just as well by sitting on their hands.

Basically, it's a bit both (which honestly, it was always going to be).

I’m happy (this is my conclusion, I’m not trying to convince anyone else of anything) to say that labour would have won this election without reform running, but in no way would the majority look anything like it does (duh). In that sense, reform gifted labour the result it got. I think it’s very likely it would have been a hung parliament if reform stood down again.

Edit

Actually one more thing. It's not a surprise, but, statistically, an increase in reform vote increases the odds of a labour win. An increase in tory vote statistically lowers the odds of a labour win. As a control libdems aren't statistically significant (which is actually interesting in terms of the two parties nod-and-wink electoral strategy).